"Ice Mummies: Frozen in Heaven"

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SPONSOR: Tonight, on NOVA, high atop an Andean summit, a little boy's
frozen body reveals dark secrets of a lost culture. Did the Inca sacrifice
their children to appease the gods? Now, a NOVA team returns to an ancient
burial ground to unearth the answer. What mysteries lie frozen in
heaven?

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NARRATOR: Rising high above the South American continent, the Andes seem
untouched by earthly struggles. But their pristine, ice-capped peaks are
haunted by a dark secret: a deadly mountaintop ritual. These frozen bodies—all children—date to the time of the Inca—the great civilization that
ruled the Andes 500 years ago. How they died has remained shrouded in mystery.
Now, a new kind of scientist—part scholar, part adventurer—is unlocking
the secrets of the ancient mummies. Anthropologist Johan Reinhard has spent
nearly two decades exploring Andean peaks.

JOHAN REINHARD: For about sixteen years I've done research on people's
beliefs about mountains in the Andes because it's like a key to understanding a
lot of parts of Andean cosmology, religion.

NARRATOR: Today, Johan begins a climb to the top of Sara Sara, a giant
volcano in southern Peru. When he first climbed the mountain in 1983, Johan
found the ruins of ancient walls on the summit. He hoped to excavate the site,
but never got the chance. Violent weather and terrorism prevented his return
for more than 13 years. Now that the strife has subsided, Johan is mounting an
expedition to Sara Sara, along with a team of Peruvian archaeologists. Joining
them are residents of Quilcata, the town at the base of the mountain. Like
their Inca ancestors, the villagers believe that Sara Sara has supernatural
powers. The mountains are held to govern the weather, commanding the course of
the clouds and bringing life-giving rain. If the mountain god fails to provide,
disaster will follow. But was the Incas' fear of these deities so great, they
would sacrifice their children to appease them? The Incas had no written
language, so much of what we know about them comes from chronicles written by
the Spanish who conquered the Inca Empire in the 16th century. These rare
drawings depicting Inca life are the work of a descendant of Inca nobility who
grew up under Spanish rule. When the conquistadors landed in 1532, the Incas
were at the height of their power. Their kingdom, stretching from Ecuador to
Chile, rivaled the size of the Roman Empire. Like the Romans, the Incas were
innovative engineers. Undaunted by vertical terrain, they built majestic
mountaintop retreats like Machu Picchu. Their distinctive, imperial style was
everywhere, from their architecture, to their intricately woven fabrics. Bill
Conklin is an Inca scholar specializing in textiles. He believes that one of
the key ingredients in the Incas' success was their unique attitude toward
conquest.

WILLIAM CONKLIN: The Inca were a cleverly imperial people. They were on the
one hand a military empire, but they accomplished a lot of their conquering by
persuasion. They were enormously clever at confronting tribes that were alien
initially, offering to worship their deities, incorporate them into the Inca
kingdom, let them join the brotherhood so to speak.

NARRATOR: One ancient Andean tradition that the Incas embraced was
mountain worship.

CONKLIN: The people of the Andes previous to the Incas did worship
mountains, but in a different way. They seemed to have worshipped mountains
from a distance, but the Incas are the ones who got the idea of climbing this
ladder to heaven and going up to the top of the mountain and actually engaging
in their ritual practices at that spot which must have been their concept of
heaven.

NARRATOR: While still on the lower slopes of Sara Sara, Johan's team
discovers evidence of ancient mountain worship. It's in a cave, thousands of
feet below the summit.

WALTER DIAZ: We've found metal artifacts along with some ceramics. From the
ceramics, we think these are from the Wari culture. Further studies will
determine the meaning of all this. We've also found human skulls, as well as
animal remains.

NARRATOR: The finds are intriguing, but they're not Inca. They were
probably left by the Wari, a culture that flourished in Peru 500 years before
the Inca. On his last trip, Johan saw Inca ruins 1000 feet higher up.

REINHARD: There's an Inca site that's out of the way. It's what we're
talking about doing is sending the burros up ahead with some gear and some of
us splitting off and heading on over to take a look at the Inca site.

NARRATOR: Sara Sara is over 150 miles south of Cuzco, the Inca capital,
but according to a Spanish chronicle, it was among the most venerated mountains
in the empire. Johan hopes the ruins will help him confirm the mountain's
prominence.

REINHARD: We're at 15,200 feet, about 220 feet and we're at a hill top
which has been a whole series of structures built. They look to be clearly
Inca, some with walls up to about a meter and a half, about 5 feet high. The
number of the structures and the layout indicates that this was a staging point
on the way up to the summit of Sara Sara.

NARRATOR: Johan's partner on the expedition is Doctor Jose Antonio Chavez,
an archeologist from the Catholic University in Arequipa.

ANTONIO CHAVEZ: We are in two very important, large rooms here and nearby
are a couple of small corrals. There are also living quarters probably for the
people who fetched and carried material such as wood for the ascent of the Sara
Sara volcano.

NARRATOR: The complex appears to be a huge staging area used by the Incas
on their journeys up the mountain.

REINHARD: What we see here up in the background is the western northern
summit. There's one we can't see just in the back where the ruins are located,
but clearly to us anyway it looks like the Incas would have gone up perhaps
that scree slope or perhaps up this ridge, then up that scree slope to get to
the summit and it's one of the few routes of access that you can get on this
mountain because it's quite steep all the way round.

NARRATOR: Johan's interest in Sara Sara was sparked in part by intriguing
references in the Spanish Chronicles. But was Peru's past accurately portrayed
in the invaders' accounts? Sonia Guillen is one of Peru's leading experts on
mummified bodies. She has spent years studying the continents of exposed graves
in the vast coastal desert of southern Peru. Like many other investigators, she
is highly suspicious of the Spanish chronicles.

SONIA GUILLEN: You have to take chronicles with, with a grain of salt. You,
you, there're chroniclers and chroniclers, they're the ones that were closer
to, to, to the events. Those are the ones that heard about it, they, they were
not close to them. They also had their own intentions. Some of the chroniclers,
for example, were sent to destroy the religious activity of the Indians. They
made sure that they looked like pagan people. That led to the belief that the
priests were exaggerating in their presentation of rituals.

NARRATOR: Accounts of one Inca ceremony in particular seemed exaggerated:
capa cocha—a mysterious ritual in which the Incas sacrificed their children
to the mountain gods.

GUILLEN: The capa cocha ritual was always presented as very bloody and,
and very unchristian.

NARRATOR: The descriptions were so grotesque, the scholars doubted the
ceremony actually took place.

CONKLIN: Although the evidence for capa cocha has been there in the
Spanish chroniclers for years, nobody paid much attention to it until the
discovery of frozen bodies which suddenly makes the whole subject real.

NARRATOR: Deep in the bowels of a museum in Chile, a translucent coffin
holds evidence that suggesting capa cocha was all too real. Found on a
mountaintop in 1954, he's been locked in a freezer ever since. The frozen body
of a young boy. He died 500 years ago—a child of the Inca. They named him
the El Plomo boy, for the peak where he was discovered. Dr. Silvia Quevedo
Kawasaki leads the team of conservationists which is struggling to keep the
child as well preserved in the lab as he was in his icy tomb.

KAWASAKI: We do this every 5 or 10 years, but we haven't done it since
1985. This little piece I'm removing will be sent away for analysis in order to
calculate humidity. He has a characteristic smell caused by changes in body
fat. Although it's a strong, penetrating smell, it's a good one. As doctors
we're guided by smells, by touch, by sensitivity. Everything available to us is
a valid resource. Sometimes, the smell tells us his condition. And in this
case, it's good.

NARRATOR: The El Plomo boy was well adorned with exquisite Inca textiles
and jewelry, all perfectly preserved. Found with him was an array of artifacts,
including small pouches containing his baby teeth and nail clippings. There was
a gold llama, and a distinctive silver figurine. These were all classic Inca
offerings to the gods. And so, it seems, was the boy. He was a capa cocha
sacrifice.

KAWASAKI: To me, he's an exceptional human being. He still embodies all
the energy of the people who went with up the mountains to sacrifice him to the
gods. You can still see it—the energy in him. His face looks very peaceful.
He passed from sleep to death without realizing it.

NARRATOR: A gentile death—in stark contrast to the Spaniards' gruesome
descriptions. Now that actual evidence was emerging, Inca attitudes toward
human sacrifice had to be thoroughly reexamined.

REINHARD: What the Incas did is very different from a lot of societies
where you did human sacrifice. They weren't doing it wholesale, for example,
like the Aztecs were, or eating some of the victims. They were quite the
contrary, was a whole different concept. You had the parents of the children
actually get involved in many cases. We know that. And it was an honor to have
your child be selected.

NARRATOR: The children chosen for sacrifice were said to be perfect—In
death, they would be deified.

REINHARD: Children were considered to be pure. Your pre-puberty child
still hadn't gotten the sins of the adults so that they viewed it as one of the
best emissaries to the deities.

NARRATOR: The Spanish described in detail the ceremonies leading up to the
sacrifice.

CONKLIN: The children were brought to Cuzco, their capital, and they were
paraded or marched to these mountaintops across the country, in some cases
hundred of miles. They walked apparently in straight lines up and down the
mountain tops in a very formal ritual procession with songs and ceremonies
involved all the way, until the final moment up at the top of the mountain when
the child was sacrificed and the burial then occurred.

NARRATOR: The frozen mountaintop preserved forever elements of the
ceremony, including evidence of the child's long journey.

KAWASAKI: His feet show signs of having walked a long way. One foot is
callused, and both feet are swollen. Also his fingers are frost-bitten -this is
very significant. It means he was alive when he reached his destination.

REINHARD: Over the last four decades, many archaeologists have tried to
find other capa cocha children. Most have come up empty handed. Then, in 1995,
Johan Reinhard discovered a frozen girl—the first ever found—on Mount
Ampato, in Peru. Nicknamed Juanita, this five hundred year old mummy is
amazingly well preserved. When she went on display in Washington D.C.,
thousands flocked to see her. Juanita's popularity helped Johan fund further
research, including his return to Sara Sara. He and his teammates have been
working their way up to the slopes for three days now. At 18,000 feet, the air
is very thin. Every step is an effort. Reaching the summit brings little
relief... On this expedition, the hardest part isn't the climb, but the digging—through several feet of rock and solid ice.

REINHARD: Well it's looking very snowy. The concern now is just how deep
the snow is because we're going to have to obviously clear it. We're hopeful
that this part is still intact because you can see the edge here, so that this
hasn't been hopefully excavated. We'll find out when we clear the snow. I'm
going down further here. This, from 1983 this section of the wall has collapsed
and the concern could be that this would be, have been due to some looting or
digging in here. We won't know until we excavate. It could also just be
natural, you know I mean it's been quite awhile, it's 13 years, and the depth
of the walls is pretty clear when you start looking down here. It's about, it's
almost 2 meters there and as you go around this is all part of the wall here
that we're seeing. Comes out around here, it's about 2 meters right down here.
It's over 6 feet, so they went to a lot of work to make this broad area, put in
fill. Imagine the amount of loads they must have taken from around here to, to
fill this all in.

NARRATOR: The summit of Sara Sara is a huge complex of man-made platforms,
shaped by stone retaining walls and filled with gravel. Johan is standing on
the lower of the two main terraces, visible only as stone circles above the
snow. On the opposite northern side, a collection of boulders marks a small
platform. To the east, a series of four terraces runs down between rocky
outcrops. Johan believes the southern end holds the most promise.

REINHARD: Where we're standing right now is on one of the south-eastern
corners and one of the deepest corners and that's generally the deepest places
is where you usually find something, so we could be right now standing on top
of potentially a human sacrifice, but certainly some kind of offerings I would
think would be in this section right here.

NARRATOR: Was this the last sight seen by a child 500 years ago? The Incas
intended their offerings to last for eternity. But in less than 100 years,
Catholic monks were retracing the children's footsteps with a very different
aim.

GUILLEN: The Spanish came here to indoctrinate the natives, so they, they
had this very solace purpose of changing their pagan ways. Part of that implied
destroying their gods and destroying their shrines, making sure all those
beliefs would disappear.

NARRATOR: The monks didn't merely record Inca traditions: they also did
their best to uproot them. They hunted down and destroyed anything sacred to
the culture, including the bodies of capa cocha children.

GUILLEN: In a way you could say that they succeeded because everybody here
became, in the Andes, became Christian. They accepted the, the, the coming
religion, but, but they also didn't succeed because the Andean traditions were
so strong that eventually they, they merged with some of the Christian beliefs.
There, there's this level in which some of the local gods just got different
names so I don't think the Vatican would recognize what's being practiced here
as what they would expect the Catholic religion to be.

ARCADIO MAMANI: This ceremony is carried out when you want to ask the
mountain for something good. in this case, we're asking the mountain to protect
us. Help us in everything we do, so that we should not suffer any misfortune.
This is a way of achieving harmony with the mountain.

NARRATOR: Before digging, Johan's team makes a traditional offering to the
mountain of llama fetuses.

REINHARD: The llama fetus represents like the entire llama and, but it's
the essence of the llama. In Andean beliefs, you can have things that are very
small, but since they have been ritually invoked, they, they have all the
essence of the entire thing and when you offer it you're offering the entire
animal. Fetuses are believed to be a favorite food of the mountain deities so
they're very pleased when they get these. Through time, you begin to see the
mountains in a different way, you begin to see them just like the villagers do.
They say they're alive and for you they come alive in a certain way because
you're beginning to see how they view them.

NARRATOR: On the summit, the mountain seems reluctant to yield its
secrets. The team must chop through six feet of 500 year old gravel—now
frozen rock hard. Every spare container is commandeered for boiling snow, to
help soften the ground.

REINHARD: Where water really comes important in a sense not so much here—just can't make that much of a dent in this kind of frost. When it comes in
really important is when you find some artifact or among the and then you can
work around it carefully, or even sometimes they're frozen rock hard into the
ice, a mixture of rock and ice, and you can melt, you know melt it around it
and free it without damaging the textiles.

NARRATOR: Hacking through the frozen gravel is exhausting labor. The air
contains about half the oxygen found at sea level, so each worker can swing his
pick only a few times before stopping to catch his breath.

REINHARD: It's inevitable during the course of dealing with hard terrain
like this that some time you're going to actually hit an object and fortunately
that's happened very rarely and usually what you get is a bit of textile or a
bit of material, straw or something like that which gives an indication of
something there and then work almost stops and you start working very carefully
and then you free it up. But imagine let's say just there was a statue right
there.

NARRATOR: But there's no need to imagine a find—in a matter of hours,
Jose Antonio Chavez spots the real thing—A silver Inca shawl pin lying on
the surface of the ground. Soon he finds five similar pins. None are
buried.

CHAVEZ: These are shawl pins, probably silver. They were used as clasps
for clothing or cloaks. It depended on the wearer. Usually women wore them.
They are a well known feature of the Inca world. We found them lying on the
surface and I assume they were part of some sacrifice that took place. But we
haven't found anything else nearby.

NARRATOR: Although this shows the site was used by the Incas, it could be
bad news for the archaeologists. The Incas usually buried their offerings.
Artifacts found on the surface often mean another sort of excavation has taken
place. It's a problem afflicting every archaeological site in Peru, looters. An
ancient cemetery near where Sonia Guillen works is a typical example.

GUILLEN: In this area we have very good preservation of organic material
and this is what the looters expose. Unfortunately this has been greatly
destroyed by the activity of looters looking for pottery, textiles and, and
hopefully they, they did expect to find some gold. Because of some
superstitions, when they find the mummy they will take the head away violently
and throw it away and separate it from the body. Looters, looters are grave
robbers and they're thieves you know, they're destroying evidence that should
be important for them, for themselves, and they're—This is a resource that
like any type of resource is, it will end you know, the more they destroy the
more we will have less to study, less to protect, less to show in museums, less
to keep for generations to come, so they are our worst enemy for any type of,
not just the scientific work that needs to be done, but the protection of our
heritage.

NARRATOR: The looters, also known as huaqeros, will go to any lengths to
find capa cocha burials.

CONKLIN: The only advantage that the burials have is that they are at such
remote locations and so inaccessible but of course the fame and world-wide
publicity associated with this undoubtedly inspires the huaqueros and the
diggers to climb to the mountain tops and dig for their portion of the gold and
the rewards that they can find there.

REINHARD: There's hardly any mountain top that has not been looted,
including this one. Unfortunately there has been use of dynamite that have
exploded bodies. Once I even pulled out to my amazement an ear from a wall at
20,000 feet, so it was exploded by people who wanted to get at the
artifacts.

NARRATOR: The threat of looting heightens the team's resolve to find and
conserve Inca burial sites. But now it seems this site may disappoint them.
After several fruitless days, Jose decides to give up digging on the north
side. Johan perseveres, and at last, there's a glimmer of hope: a layer of
grass buried within the main, southern platform.

REINHARD: What we've hit at about 50 centimeters is some nice batch of
what they call Ichu. It's a wild grass and some pieces of wood. That's a good
indication that we're on the right track. You wouldn't find this kind of thing
unless there was some kind of offering that they were making.

NARRATOR: Grass and trees don't grow at this altitude, so they must have
been carried up the mountain, probably by the Incas.

NARRATOR: The site looks more promising, but not the weather. A fierce
lightning storm suddenly sweeps over the summit. Everyone scrambles down to
camp, 500 feet below. The storm is a sobering reminder of the violent forces
that lurk about the mountain. It was this kind of power which struck fear into
the hearts of the Incas—and moved them to appease the mountain gods with
gifts. One of those gifts is kept here in a freezer in Argentina. The body of a
young boy, one of only a handful of well-preserved capa cocha children ever
found. He was discovered in 1985 on Mount Aconagua, the tallest peak in the
Western Hemisphere. The top of his head was damaged by exposure, but the rest
is almost perfectly preserved. Although the El Plomo boy from Chile appeared to
have died peacefully, the final moments of the Aconcagua boy were
different.

JUAN SCHOBINGER: We found in his intestines some liquid that the child
ingested. With the help of chemical and other analysis, we concluded that the
last food consumed by the child was a liquid containing the red color of
achiote, a color symbolizing life.

CARLOS DE CICCO: Achiote is a vegetable product, very similar to saffron in
its chemical properties and color. It was found in the vomit which can still be
seen on the teeth. They are stained a reddish color as a result of the
vomit.

NARRATOR: The clothes he was wearing were covered in vomit and diarrhea,
both stained red by the achiote dye.

DE CICCO: The child must have realized that he was about to be sacrificed
on one of the highest burial grounds in the world. So during the ceremony the
child must have been very distressed. I suppose the diarrhea and vomiting which
the child suffered in his final moments were the result of this state of
stress. These loose stools show the child was, I think, very, very frightened—absolutely terrified.

NARRATOR: No one can know for certain what this young child felt in his
final moments, but clearly, he was physically ill. Exhaustion and high altitude
could have contributed to his nausea. But his death was far from natural. The
seven-year old was so tightly wrapped in textiles that his ribs were broken,
his pelvis dislocated. The life was literally squeezed out of him. Was this the
norm for capa cocha? Were the Spanish right when they described a violent
ritual? The discovery of Juanita provided new opportunities to investigate.
Many of the tourists who visit Juanita comment on her calm, almost saint-like
air. But during her trip to Washington, the mummy was CAT scanned by an
advanced 3D imaging system at Johns Hopkins University. The test revealed a
darker secret behind the serene expression.

ELLIOT FISHMAN: This image is an image of her skull looking directly at us
and the first thing you can see is her orbits. The eye socket, the left orbit
is nice and round, it's perfectly normal. The right orbit is kind of compressed
and you can look at the lateral wall and there's actually a fracture. If we
then rotate this image and you can see this line in her frontal bone which is
evidence of a skull fracture. It's a fairly significant fracture and if you
look at both of these together it's a type of evidence that someone who is
struck by a hard blow on the side of the head, maybe by a rock or by a stick or
by a club, and basically bled internally and that's how she died.

NARRATOR: Research on Juanita is just beginning. Scientists hope her
internal organs, as well as the textiles and offerings found with her, will
reveal more about what kind of life she led. DNA analysis of her frozen flesh
may help determine what part of the Inca empire she came from. Juanita was a
great discovery for Johan, yet something was missing, her tomb. Landslides on
Mount Ampato destroyed her ceremonial burial place, and Juanita rolled 200 feet
down the mountain. The perfect capa cocha burial; is yet to be found, and Johan
suspects it may be hidden somewhere on Sara Sara. So far, there are no signs of
the coveted ancient grave site. After five days, the team has found nothing
more than the shawl pins. Then, an archaeological student, Walter Diaz, spots
something in his small patch of gravel.

DIAZ: The first thing I noticed was a little piece of textile and what
might be hairs. I don't know what kind of hair. It might be llama or guinea
pig. But here you can see the little piece of red fabric. Look, it's a
statuette.

REINHARD: It's a male, you call from the top. Because of the flat head
just from here I can tell that it's a male. You can see the textiles starting
to come around, see around the body.

NARRATOR: What Walter has found is a tiny silver statue wrapped in
textiles, a classic capa cocha offering. As they clear the earth away, the
workers find a second silver statue, a female, the same design as the one found
with the El Plomo boy.

REINHARD: There's probably a lot more offerings in the nooks and crannies
around here. The mountain was extremely sacred for the Incas and the people in
this entire region. Over the years you're bound to get a number of
offerings.

DIAZ: It's probably a gold vicuna. Usually we find silver or gold llamas.
This time it is something different. Possibly, it is a vicuna.

NARRATOR: Next is a figurine carved from a seashell, once as valuable to
the Incas as gold.

DIAZ: It's a tiny llama figure made from a spondylus shell. That's a
marine mollusc found in Ecuador, north of Peru.

NARRATOR: Seashell miniatures, and gold and silver statuettes, were
offered to the gods along with the capa cocha children. Although the shawl pins
were found to the north, Walter's statues came out of a small rock crevice high
on the summit.

REINHARD: What's ironic is this is a teeny little platform. Those were
huge platforms we have on the other side we haven't found anything yet, but
that's probably because it's steeper. You have a small platform like this and
you have a better chance of finding something quickly because it's
shallow.

NARRATOR: Then, finally, a tantalizing find over the cover on the main
platform. A small silver rod glints within the ice.

REINHARD: What they just uncovered here is a silver llama figurine, you
just see a bit of it here. Beautifully preserved and what's really exciting to
us is that just below this, some of this straw and robe and we had thought
there might be a burial here and here we see this hole, in other words we're
seeing ice which means there's a hole there and with this llama figurine in
front of it. It's quite possible that we will find a human sacrifice here when
we continue digging.

NARRATOR: Johan hopes this tiny llama is a sign of more exciting things to
come.

DIAZ: This is a silver male llama which was facing north-east.

NARRATOR: While the male and female statues were found in a crevice above
the main platform, the silver llama was unearthed close to the stop where Johan
expected to find a mummy. Hopes are high that more digging will reveal the
focus of all the offerings, the body of a child. But as the days pass, only
Walter's small rock crevice yields more artifacts, seven in all, including a
beautiful gold male statue. The ice hole on the main platform is a
disappointment. Hours of hacking and pouring hot water reveal nothing but more
grass. Time on the mountain is running out. The team has been here for nine
days. Supplies are low, and everyone is feeling the effects of the altitude.
Desperate to make the most of what little time remains, team members launch
small excavations all over the summit. Amazingly, one of them, on the eastern
side, pays off.

CHAVEZ: Since yesterday we've had a hunch we'd find something. Jose Luis
had already discovered a small offering. So, we started to clean this area and
we found the walls of a tomb.

NARRATOR: The pungent stench of decomposing flesh attracts other team
members. As Jose scrapes away the gravel, they find themselves staring into the
face of a small mummy.

REINHARD: We've smelled it before. That's why I thought there was a mummy
here even before they found it. And that means usually it's already decomposed
to a degree so what we're getting there are going to be textiles which looks
like there's still some textiles left, although damaged and a skeleton, but the
nice thing is we'll get the whole complex and we'll get in and situated and we
get all different artifacts. You can already see a statue here. There's going
to be others when they found the silver statue right here, so there's going to
be more stuff that's going to be found in association with it, and that's the
kind of things that really make this exciting.

NARRATOR: To Johan, the discovery is proof that the Incas used Sara-Sara
for child sacrifice. The complete grave will help the archaeologists paint a
clearer picture of this ancient ritual. The mummy was buried in the terraces
east of the main platform. Since these face the morning sun, the ground here is
not frozen, and the body will most likely be degraded. As the mud is removed,
it's clear the whole bundle is wrapped in sac-like textiles.

DIAZ: What we have here is part of the head. The mummy is pointing
downwards. These are the feet and part of the body. And possibly above the knee
is a small offering which we can see here.

NARRATOR: Even though the caked mud, a glimmer of color is visible, fine
stripes on 500 year old Inca cloth.

DIAZ: Here's the hair.

NARRATOR: Just beneath the textiles is a clue to the child's sex.

DIAZ: The shawl pin goes through the cloak. The head is covered by another
piece of cloth, but the shawl pin goes underneath that cloth and here it
is.

REINHARD: Where he's working right now shows a tupu, a shawl pin, which
means that this is a female mummy.

NARRATOR: Another girl who lost her life to the mountain gods. She was
found just in time, the team can't afford to stay on the mountain any longer.
But Johan is determined to return. He's convinced that Sara Sara harbors many
more invaluable finds.

REINHARD: There's been some looting, but there's also a tremendous amount
that hasn't been touched and it's very, very exciting really with a lot of
different, smaller sites and we still have quite a bit of work ahead of us to
get to the bottom of it. We'll give some thought to how to make this a more
efficient operation when we come back next year.

NARRATOR: Still partly frozen and caked in the dirt, the mummy is carried
down to the village below, where she is nicknamed "Sarita" after the great
mountain which claimed her life. Back at the Catholic University in Arequipa,
Jose Antonio Chavez leads the team of conservationalists who will care for the
mummy. Their first step is to painstakingly thaw, separate, and refreeze
several layers of textiles. As the team peels away the coverings, startling
discoveries come to light. A large pouch made of feathers hangs down the girl's
back. It probably contained the coca leaves. On the mountain, the
archaeologists though the tiny body belonged to an eight or nine year old. Now,
examination of her teeth show she was actually about fifteen. Unlike some of
the other mummies, which were dressed in royal Inca garb, Sarita died wearing
very ordinary, everyday clothing. Still, she was clearly a capa cocha
sacrifice. X-rays of her skull reveal that, like Juanita, Sarita was killed by
a severe blow to the head. Each new discovery is providing more information for
anthropologists, as they struggle to untangle the dark mysteries of capa cocha.
These were the chosen ones, offered up by their communities to please the
emperor and the mountain gods. Laden with offerings, they journeyed to sacred
peaks throughout the Inca empire. The children climbed higher than they had
ever gone before, to windblown spires of ice and rock. There, where earth and
heaven touch, they died.

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NOVA: We can tell the story by looking at the way the earliest Christians
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The story of how the death of one man changed the world. Watch "From Jesus
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